Nothing was exposed, because nobody said anything.
Anthony Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday under subpoena from Senator Rand Paul, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right rather than answer questions. He said he was 'following [his] attorney's advice by taking the Fifth' [1].
A Benny Johnson video posted the evening before is titled 'Dr. Fauci Testifying LIVE Right Now Before Senate As Dark CRIMES Exposed | Time To LOCK Him Up' [2].
Two problems. The second is the one that matters.
The first is chronology: a video posted Tuesday evening cannot show a Wednesday hearing happening 'LIVE Right Now.'
The second is that the hearing produced no testimony at all. A witness who invokes the Fifth answers nothing, so nothing can have been exposed by it.
Taking the Fifth is not an admission, and it is worth being precise about why, because the instinct runs the other way.
The privilege exists so that a person facing a prosecutor who has publicly announced a desired outcome does not have to supply the material.
Fauci named exactly that in his opening remarks: 'The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, "behind bars"' [1].
Whether that reading is right is a judgement. That a senator has publicly pledged to put a witness behind bars is checkable, and Paul's own posts are the record.
Paul's case rests on more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal pandemic diary, which he released and characterised by saying what Fauci 'wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories' [1].
This newsroom looked at one strand of that diary yesterday - the pulmonary infarction claim - and found the document did not say what the claim needed it to say.
Fauci's attorney David Schertler called the accusations 'false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable' [1].
The honest summary is that a subpoenaed witness declined to testify, the committee learned nothing, and both sides left with the story they arrived with.
That is a real thing that happened. It is not the thing in the title.
